Overall and Final Verdict
Now that I have taken a closer look at the Gigabyte R9 280 and ran it through all of our new and improved benchmark suite we have a better idea of where it stands. For starters, the new AMD drivers really breathe new life into the R9 280, this card performed well above the last R9 280 that I tested and a lot of that was driver related. With that it falls into a sweet spot with in game performance. Every game tested was more than playable at its highest settings at 1080p. 1440p not so much, but that is expected from a card at this price point. The other thing I really liked about the card was the all blacked out design, a lot of manufactures go with colors to set themselves apart but in this case it is nice to know the card will look good in nearly any build.
It wasn’t perfect though, the large heatsink performed well in cooling testing but was a little noisy overall. On top of that the cooler was larger than the PCB, making this a bigger card than a lot of other R9 280’s. Really though for a lot of people though the size of the card won’t be an issue. Noise wise is isn’t going to make you go deaf, it’s just louder than a lot of other card designs. You will have to decide if that is an issue for you. As for price, well this card is listed much lower than the GTX 770 that it performed on par with multiple times so when you compare it there it is a good deal but when compared to other R9 280’s it is a little on the high side. If all out cooling is what you need at the cost of size and noise then this is the perfect card for you. If you want something a little quieter you can most likely find another R9 280 at a little better price.
